[ug-bosug] Some thoughts after attending the Javaone event's Day one

[Sriram Narayanan]

All:

For those of you who don't know, I'm a member of the Bangalore and the
Pune Open Solaris User Groups. I'm here at San Francisco to talk about
Open Grok on the CommunityOne track of the Javaone event. I've given
my talk, and that's a separate topic.

I'm writing the following mail after attending an important talk by
Ian Murdock, and after milling about with various Ubuntu, Solaris, and
Gentoo Linux users.

There is this general feeling world wide that Solaris is not as usable
as Linux is. People regular point out that the installer is bad, that
the POSIX extensions are not easily available, that the standard
Solaris 10 desktop looks dull compared to the fancy desktops we see on
Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu and the like.

At the CommunityOne, Ian Murdock spoke about plans within Sun to make
Solaris more Linux-like. He was of the opinion that Solaris 10 is not
there yet. Sadly, he made no mention of Belenix, Schillix or Martux.
He only spoke of Solaris Express Community Release and of Nexenta as
distributions besides the standard Solaris 10.

I felt that Belenix deserved a mention because it puts up a reasonably
good KDE and XFCE desktop.

With Belenix, we have a great distribution on our hands. It is based
on the most recent code bases. Because there isn't any corporate
pressure, it can freely make use of the most recent OpenSolaris code
base _and_ contain experimental features. It comes as a LiveCD.The
Belenix developers are members of our mailing list and always respond
to questions. And if you want to customize Belenix, you have the
remastering toolkit.

I think this is a good time for the Indian Solaris users to get
together and to add features to Belenix that we'd like to see.

Do you think that Ubuntu's installer is better ? Or perhaps Redhat's ?
Or perhaps the one from OpenSuse ? I think it'd be worth the effort to
just build those installers once on Solaris and to then see how we
like the user experience. Perhaps we'd need to add some choices,
perhaps not.

The complete Belenix installer's source is provided on the Belenix
LiveCD itself. Moinak has given the absolute file paths in another
very recent discussion thread on this mailing list.

Do you spot inconsistencies in the menu items between XFCE/KDE on some
Linux distro as compared to Belenix ? Then go ahead and try to fix
them. The Belenix remastering toolkit is available from download from
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=download.

Our very own Anil Gulecha has gone ahead and got Belenix booting off a
USB device. This proves that Belenix can be worked with.

People do take notice of accomplishments. I wore the Belenix T shirt,
and had several people walking up to me and telling me how they've
tried Belenix and how they liked the USB bootablility. An XFCE user
told me about how he liked seeing XFCE on Belenix.

Based on my interactions at the Javaone with people from other
countries, I'm pretty impressed with the level of advancement that we
have in India in terms of being technology savvy. We have access to
the same documentation, open source code repositories and online
community forums that other technologists worldwide have. All that we
need to do is to get started with what ever small steps that we can
think of.

I think we're second to none, and can blaze a great trail. It's not
often in one's life time that one gets to be a part of history. Or to
make history that others can be part of.

-- Sriram